chapter 11 - CONTINUING EVOLUTION

 

The Trend of Evolution: Increased Adaptive Capacity,  230      

The System of Modern Societies,  236           

Conclusion, 240 

 

            Societal evolution, this book's dominant perspective, belongs to a movement in contemporary social science which aspires to emulate the Renaissance by doing more than revive old ideas.  I have reconsidered the idea of social evolution in the context of theoretical advances accumulated since the earlier evolutionists wrote.  If the idea of evolution is fruitful, the progress of social science in the last two generations has made it more fruitful.  Furthermore, this progress fits into general developments in modern science.  Advances in the biological sciences since Herbert Spencer's day have generated new conceptions of the continuity between organic evolution and sociocultural evolution.¹   Because early evolutionary theory treated society and culture largely by imputing causation to environmental factors² within the dichotomous framework of, not just heredity and environment, but actually heredity versus environment, it conceived of organic and cultural evolution as discontinuous.  This perspective is no longer justifiable in the light of modern biology.  

 

231

 

The Trend of Evolution: Increased Adaptive Capacity

 

            To be an evolutionist, one must define a trend in evolution - one cannot be a radical cultural relativist who regards the Arunta of Australia and such modern societies as the Soviet Union as equally authentic cultures to be judged as equals in all respects.  My perspective involves evolutionary judgments - for example, that intermediate societies are more advanced than primitive societies, and modern societies are more advanced than intermediate societies.  I have tried to make my criterion congruent with that used in biological theory, calling more advanced the systems that display greater generalized adaptive capacity. 

 

            The present analysis differs from older evolutionary theories in that the developmental dimension is compatible with the idea of branching among lines of evolution.  The evidence indicates that, in the earlier stages of evolution, there have been multiple origins of the basic societal types.  Thus, we need not postulate one primitive origin of all intermediate societies even though independent cultural legitimation and stratification are necessary conditions of intermediate societies.  At all stages, variability can be adequately treated only by an analytic theory of variable components.  The development of such theory since Spencer's time enables us to construct a more sophisticated evolutionary scheme than his.

 

            There are two types of societies besides those which historical evidence links through continuous processes to evolutionary advances. 

First are those which have been eliminated by the socio-cultural version of natural selection - e.g., no approximation of ancient Israel or Greece has survived as a society in the modern world.  Yet, the fact that the kingdom of David and Solomon and the polis of Athens were eliminated did not destroy their future cultural contribution. 

Second are those which, though not developing into more advanced types, are established in niches which, despite the existence of more advanced societies, permit them to survive for long periods without undergoing changes of pattern.  The many primitive societies studied by anthropologists are of this type. Their characteristics approximate those of our own pre-historical antecedents. The exact extent of such approximation can be determined only by imperfect theoretical analysis. 

In dealing with the main patterns of evolutionary development, I have focused mainly on the societies which gave rise to significant evolutionary developments.  It has not been possible to give equal attention to either of the two types of dead-end cases, although Israel and Greece have been surveyed from the standpoint of their cultural developments.  I have tried to emphasize the failure of adaptive development in a number of societal cases.  However, an adequate treatment of the balance of successes and failures and the factors determining them would

require a different study.³ 

 

³ The problem of failures is treated more fully in E. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1063) and in a number of Eisenstadt's papers, some of which are included in his Essays in Comparative Institutions (New York: Wiley, 1965).

 

232

 

            One difference between socio-cultural evolution and organic evolution is that cultural patterns and content can be diffused, not only from generation to generation within a society, but also from society to society, as cases like Israel and Greece show.  A parallel between organic and socio-cultural evolution is that structural analysis must take priority over the analysis of process and change.  One need not develop a general analysis of the main processes of social change in order to make claims about the structural patterning of evolutionary development.  This conclusion is established in biology, where morphology, including comparative anatomy, is the backbone of evolutionary theory.  Although Darwin advanced ideas about process in the principle of natural selection, he stated explicitly that he could not prove in a single case that it has changed one species into another, but only that "it groups and explains well a host of facts . . ." , the majority of which concerned structure.⁴  Darwin did not present a developed theory of evolutionary process in regard to the genesis of variations.  But this did not impugn the scientific status of the theory of organic evolution, as Darwin developed it. 

 

            Some sociologists insist that only dynamic analysis has scientific standing.  I am not saying that contributions to the analysis of process would not improve evolutionary theory.  I am saying that the use of available sociological, anthropological, archaeological, and historical evidence to order structural types and relate them sequentially is a first order of business.  Furthermore, the task is as much theoretical as empirical.  If such advanced structural knowledge is to be developed and utilized, social science must do theoretical work as well as continuing empirical research.  Max Weber's system of ideal types surpassed, some half century ago, earlier structural analysis.  Furthermore, Weber's formulations were associated with vast ranges of historical and comparative material.  Notwithstanding Weber's concern with religion and cultural movements, much of his structural theory concerned economic and political organization.⁵ 

The present generation of sociologists is making advances on Weber's work in these fields.  In the area of theory, there has been sufficient advance so that most of the difficulties of Weber's "type atomism" can be avoided.  To a greater degree, variability can be analyzed as a function of different combinations of the same analytically defined components.⁶ 

 

⁴ Charles Darwin, quoted in the "Preface" to Talcott Parsons, Edward A. Shils, Kasper 0. Naegele, and Jease R. Pitts (eds.), Theories of Society (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). 

⁵ Cf. Talcott Parsons, "Value Objectivity in Social Science: an Interpretation of Max Weber's Contribution," Max Weber Centennial article in International Social Science Journal (1965) 27:No. 1. 

⁶ Failure to do this at each stage is a shortcoming of Marxian theories of social evolution. 

 

CONTINUING EVOLUTION  233

 

            Discussion of the advanced intermediate societies must rely on the humanistic traditions of historical, archaeological, and anthropological research.  Their methods have improved in the last two generations.  For example, my account of Egyptian society would not have been possible had I based it on the Egyptology of Breasted's era (the early decades of this century).  The advances in quantitative social science research are more relevant in dealing with the subject of modern societies.  However, in one historical context advances in quantitative social science techniques are relevant for further study of earlier types of society.  Among contemporaneous societies, we can find approximations of earlier societal types involved in the evolutional sequence.  The development of the comparative method is being extended to include a variety of underdeveloped societies as well as advanced modern types.  Although it was tempting to mobilize such material for these purposes, the difficulties of interrelating it with the historical data concerned with the flourishing of intermediate societies would have been empirically and theoretically formidable.  Since a choice was necessary, it seemed logical for an evolutionary study to follow a temporally ordered framework with the exception of contemporary primitive societies, for which no direct historical data exist. 

 

            Comparative study is also stimulating interdisciplinary research.  Two shifts have emerged.  First, anthropology, with its predilection for studying small-scale societies has become less prominent.  Considerable comparative work, especially on development, has been (lone primarily by economists, political scientists, and sociologists.  This change has advanced the integration of comparative studies into the larger corpus of social science, a factor affecting both.  Second, inter-disciplinary collaboration in the social sciences, which during and after World War II concentrated on area studies of particular national societies and regional complexes, is now emphasizing a comparative perspective.  Concomitantly, there has been growing concern with generalization, both theoretical and empirical.  Only against this background is the present essay understandable.  It attempts general structural analysis and a limited processual one.  But, in formulating and validating its propositions, it has also attempted to use the best available empirical materials. 

 

⁷ Cf. Neil J. Smelser, The Sociology of Economic Life (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

 

234  CONTINUING EVOLUTION

 

            The structural ordering of social data should never be dissociated from the analysis of process and change.  For example, any processual outcome results from the operation of plural structural factors, all of which are mutually interdependent, even if there is scientific reason to distinguish among them.  The factors of production in economic analysis are logical prototypes.⁷  In this sense, no claim that social change is determined by economic interests, ideas, personalities of particular individuals, or geographical conditions is tenable.  All such single-factor theories belong to the kindergarten stage of social science's development.  Any factor is interdependent with several others.  This truth does not preclude the hierarchical ordering of the factors.  I have distinguished two interrelated hierarchies - those of necessary conditions and of cybernetic control. 

 

The former runs from the physical, through the biological and psychological, to the social and cultural elements of action.  The various subsystems of these elements are similarly ordered.  For example, within the social system, I have called attention to the negative effects of diminutions in mobile economic resources, both goods and manpower, upon the empires' maintenance of differentiated governmental structures.  Such maintenance - as well as the prior development of such structures - depends in the conditional sense on the availability of adequate mobile economic resources; if the latter dry up enough, feudalization occurs.  However, the presence of such resources in a society does not automatically create the more differentiated type of government any more than atmospheric oxygen, although necessary for the emergence and maintenance of life, alone created human life. 

 

            The more important hierarchy for my purposes is the hierarchy of cybernetic control.  Basic innovation in the evolution of living systems, both organic and socio-cultural, does not occur automatically with increases of factors or resources at lower (conditional) levels of the cybernetic hierarchies but depends on analytically independent developments at higher levels.⁵  Essential as a large population may be for advanced social organization, the pressure of increasing numbers cannot create such organization - rather, it will lead to Malthusian checks.  This argument also applies to economic productivity and political power.  In the sense of emphasizing the role of the cybernetically highest elements in patterning action system, I am a cultural determinist rather than a social determinist.  Similarly, within the social system, the normative elements are more directive for social change than the material interests of constitutive units.  The longer the time perspective and the broader the system involved, the greater is the relative importance of higher, rather than lower, factors in the control hierarchy, regardless of whether it is pattern maintenance or pattern change that requires explanation.  The present analysis has been couched on the level of the longest time-perspective and broadest comparative scope.  Therefore, in this study, the emphasis in accounting for the main patterns of change has been placed at the highest cybernetic level.  This level is cultural rather than social and, within the cultural category, religious rather than secular.  Within the social category, values and norms, especially legal norms, stand higher than political and economic interests.  However, the consequence of following these priorities involves determining the broadest patterns of change rather than explaining detailed structures and processes.

 

⁸ The reader may wish to refer to chap. 1 for a fuller discussion of these concepts.

 

CONTINUING EVOLUTION  235

 

            High-level innovations do not determine the subsequent development of the relevant systems so automatically that we may neglect all other factors.  Quite the contrary; every developmental step depends on a series of conditional factors.  I formulate this dependence by maintaining that higher-order factors (within the social system, normative factors) must meet the conditions of becoming institutionalized in order to determine stable patterns of concrete action.⁹  This means that they must gain control over the relevant conditional factors.  This is not to say that the latter factors have only negligible importance.  It merely claims that to be controlled, conditional factors must be present in proper combinations, both in terms of one another and in terms of the normative factors and that conditional factors cannot create a new order without independent innovation at a higher normative level. 

 

            Differences in non-cultural and non-normative conditions and the ways in which they are combined with the cultural and normative factors account for much of the variation that makes any linear theory of societal evolution untenable.  But a feature of the evolutionary process is that greater differentiation increasingly frees the cybernetically higher factors from the specifics of the lower-order conditioning factors, thus enabling the patterns of the cultural system to become more generalized, objectifled, and stabilized.  These developments enhance the cultural system's potential to control wider ranges of factors at the conditional levels.  Thus, a primitive society is not only limited in territory and population, hut its culture is relatively specific to its conditions and does not readily integrate with those of other societies.  An intermediate society is, in a sense, equivalent to the integration of a number of primitive societies into one societal system.  This presupposes an integration at the cultural level between the cultural patterns and the normative system of the society.

 

⁹ Cf. Leon H. Mayhew, Law and Equal Opportunity: A Study of the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 

 

236  CONTINUING EVOLUTION

 

            A theme in my discussion of the advanced intermediate empires has been that such integrations of particularistic, less generalized structural elements have typically been incomplete.  In China, the local elements and the peasant cultures were only partially permeated by Confucian culture.  In India, the integrative shortcomings involved both localism (sometimes tribalism) anti the segmental rather than differentiated aspects of caste diversity.  In Rome and the Islamic empires, ethnic and local particularities failed to be fully integrated into the political and legal structure of the empires either as effectively dominated or, still more, as autonomously differentiated units.  The independence that components gain through differentiation and its relation to variation also has a time aspect.  A differentiated component need not be bound to one concrete territory-and-population nor to any particular period.  Culture, through documents and other artifacts, can become relatively independent of particular bearers or members of a given society.  Thus, a cultural system's consequences for subsequent societies cannot be inferred directly from its mode of involvement in the societal structures of its origin but must be analyzed in a more complex framework.  The cases of Israel and Greece are examples of this cultural-temporal independence.  A difficult problem for the naive, Marxist-type sociological analysis is to demonstrate how Hebrew and Greek influence on later societies was really based on the economic interests of either the originators or the adopters of these cultural patterns. 

 

            Confusion over issues such as these has arisen from the dogma, often implicit, that evolutionary theory must be historical in the sense of historicism.  Whether following Hegel, Marx, or later Germans such as Dilthey, historicism denied the relevance of generalized analytical theory (which systematically treats the interdependence of independently variable factors) in explaining temporally sequential socio-cultural phenomena.  In challenging this idea, Durkheim and Weber introduced a new era in sociology.  Once the problem of causal imputation is formulated analytically, the old chicken and egg problems about the priorities of ideal and material factors lose significance.  I hope that the present treatment of the problems of societal evolution will help lay to rest this ghost of our nineteenth-century intellectual past. 

 

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